it seems like there’s too much of a focus on “business” skills and middle management, and too little focus on using and applying technology.
We’d have to draw some distinctions, as “IT” is a big field. My main beef with the curricula is that, in a nutshell, they fail to teach people to think, to reason conceptually about the tools in their toolbox; and to a lesser extent that they fail to teach the craft, the technology-independent tips and tricks that experienced pros have picked up.
Sometimes that manifests as an excessive focus on technology: specifically curricula that teach people how to use tools X, Y and Z but not why these tools are useful or when to use them. Sometime that manifests as an excessive focus on this or that fad of management or scheduling; for instance, curricula heavy in “estimation models” such as COCOMO.
I’m an autodidact but I later went back to university to pick up a degree with very light course requirements in view of my experience. The one class I sat on was about distributed systems. I was told practically nothing about distributed systems, save for a brief reference to Lamport clocks, the rest of the course was spent on the details of writing “Hello world” equivalents in CORBA and Java RMI: basically running programs on the command line and learning bits of syntax. I distinguished myself by being the only student who was using unit tests to demonstrate properties of my programs.
In other words, this was a Master’s degree at one of the top scientific universities in Paris, and to this autodidact the course looked like vocational training.
We’d have to draw some distinctions, as “IT” is a big field. My main beef with the curricula is that, in a nutshell, they fail to teach people to think, to reason conceptually about the tools in their toolbox; and to a lesser extent that they fail to teach the craft, the technology-independent tips and tricks that experienced pros have picked up.
Sometimes that manifests as an excessive focus on technology: specifically curricula that teach people how to use tools X, Y and Z but not why these tools are useful or when to use them. Sometime that manifests as an excessive focus on this or that fad of management or scheduling; for instance, curricula heavy in “estimation models” such as COCOMO.
I’m an autodidact but I later went back to university to pick up a degree with very light course requirements in view of my experience. The one class I sat on was about distributed systems. I was told practically nothing about distributed systems, save for a brief reference to Lamport clocks, the rest of the course was spent on the details of writing “Hello world” equivalents in CORBA and Java RMI: basically running programs on the command line and learning bits of syntax. I distinguished myself by being the only student who was using unit tests to demonstrate properties of my programs.
In other words, this was a Master’s degree at one of the top scientific universities in Paris, and to this autodidact the course looked like vocational training.